Our public culture is one in which only the young and the beautiful will succeed. If you're forty, you're finished. — Amitava Kumar Beautiful Copy Share Image
I'm generalizing wildly, but academic books find safety in explanations that reduce the chaos of social life. — Amitava Kumar Books Copy Share Image
To write what is not dead on the page, one has to be open to all kinds of disturbances and challenges and… — Amitava Kumar Challenges Copy Share Image
I was seen as a traitor for marrying a Muslim - a Pakistani at that. — Amitava Kumar Islam Copy Share Image
I don't think any writer is a friend to the reader if he or she is not funny. — Amitava Kumar Books Copy Share Image
India's nuclear-test blasts have pretty much put to rest the myth of Indians being peace-loving Gandhians. — Amitava Kumar Being Copy Share Image
I like listening to Garrison Keillor's 'The Writer's Almanac' with my daughter. — Amitava Kumar Children Copy Share Image
Capitalism might everywhere be spreading havoc, but it is also triumphant everywhere. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel's more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the… — Amitava Kumar Authenticity Copy Share Image
'An Obedient Father' is perhaps the novel that, some might say, Arundhati Roy had wanted to write when she wrote 'The God… — Amitava Kumar Books Copy Share Image
I have a couple of thick files about things that have gone wrong between people; I ought to write about them in… — Amitava Kumar People Copy Share Image
In academe, we ought to temper our criticism of the idea of self-help because, in a more complex way, it is precisely… — Amitava Kumar Criticism Copy Share Image
In 'Bombay-London-New York,' I speak of the ways in which the 'soft' emotion of nostalgia is turned into the 'hard' emotion of… — Amitava Kumar Fundamentalism Copy Share Image
Hemingway's short story 'Hills Like White Elephants' is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway's 'iceberg theory,' which requires that a… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
I arrived in the U.S. for graduate study in literature in the fall of 1986. I was twenty-three. After a year, I… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
I should not romanticize the simplicity of a village. For instance, the place from where I used to buy a packet of… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Imagination makes us shape better stories, sure, but it also allows us to multiply possibilities. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Like every other self-respecting academic, I'm distrustful of self-help books. — Amitava Kumar Books Copy Share Image
Writers interest me for their style, their obsessions, the ways in which they approach the world. — Amitava Kumar Interest Copy Share Image
I was pretty aimless as a youth, especially in Patna. I think reading saved me. — Amitava Kumar Aimless Copy Share Image
Writing gives me the license to go, explore, and learn about the world. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
The thing about good art is that it makes you look at things in a new way. — Amitava Kumar Art Copy Share Image
Hindi writing, as well as Hindi journalism, is a great gift to Indian writing. — Amitava Kumar Gift Copy Share Image
In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions. — Amitava Kumar Immigrants Copy Share Image
“There is no point in fighting condescension with condescension.” — Amitava Kumar Condescension Copy Share Image
It is clear from Salman Rushdie's writing that politics and literature cannot be separated. Everything is political. — Amitava Kumar Literature Copy Share Image
All good works of art must ask this question: 'You want to breathe free, yes, but do you know how to kiss?' — Amitava Kumar Art Copy Share Image
What is said by the person holding a megaphone inciting a crowd, or what is said by someone who incites a rumour?… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it… — Amitava Kumar Books Copy Share Image
A writer can be subjective, even digressive, or introspective and certainly judgmental. This is a simplification, of course, but as a general… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
There is a great deal of freshness and charm in '400 Blows.' There is also a great deal of visual poetry in… — Amitava Kumar Artist Copy Share Image
If India breaks your heart with untold inequalities, it also surprises you with the unheralded achievements of its most humble citizens. — Amitava Kumar Heart Copy Share Image
A wonderful innovation of the Occupy Wall Street movement was the use of the human microphone - the name given to the… — Amitava Kumar Body Copy Share Image
An essay is not an op-ed that tells its reader what to think. An essay is a complicated working-out of one's own… — Amitava Kumar Books Copy Share Image
I have long held that many of the writers and artists working in the aftermath of 9/11 have presented a faux familiarity… — Amitava Kumar Art Copy Share Image
If the 20th century was marked by travel - planes in flight - then the events of 9/11 ushered in the age… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
For some members of the radical Left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies… — Amitava Kumar Developing countries Copy Share Image
One of my earliest lessons in guilt was imparted in childhood through the story of the death of Mahatma Gandhi's father. — Amitava Kumar Childhood Copy Share Image
In fiction, you don't invent the events. What is imaginative about it is the consciousness: how you think about the events and… — Amitava Kumar Consciousness Copy Share Image
